Sunday, February 12, 2012

Paint like Kandinsky!

Earlier this year I did a one day activity with my students in 2nd-5th grade. On the SMARTboard we looked at some of Wassily Kandinsky's abstract paintings. It was so fun to hear what the students 'saw' in his work- their interpretations were awesome! We also watched some videos on YouTube of musical animations of his work. This one is the best! 'The Kandinsky Effect'

Then I had the students listen to two different songs and we painted two seperate paintings. One was a slow, opera-like song from the movie 'Ponyo' and the other was a fast, upbeat, jazz song from the movie 'Rushmore'. Then we discussed the differences in the songs and how the two songs resulted in two very different paintings. It was a great hour-long lesson that I would do again in a heartbeat! Very fun, free and successful!!! Yippie!

Here is another video I used- they were a great tool to bridge between studying his paintings and then understanding how music was a predominant theme in Kandinsky's work.